Quote:
Originally Posted by tristann
Yes. Every time nations reject religion its place is taken by some cruel and barbaric ideology. Only few attempts in history and always the same terrible result.
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And then there are the
far greater number of examples where deeply religious nations have proven to be as cruel and barbarous as the "few examples" you can cite where ostensibly the "nations reject religion." Even the 20th Century communist regimes with their vastly improved technologies of death are pikers compared to the 80 million or so slaughtered at the hands of the Indian subcontinent's Muslim conquerors.
The reigning
zeitgeist will always be co-opted by demagogues and psychopaths. If that
zeitgeist is scientific, then science will be used to rationalize prejudice. If that
zeitgeist is religious, then religion will be used to the same purpose. For example, prior to the American Civil war American racists debated not the
biological justifications for the enslavement of black Africans, but the
Biblical justifications. In one camp were the Monogenists who asserted that blacks were enslaved as punishment for Ham's witnessing of his father Noah's nakedness; the "Curse of Ham" (Genesis 9:20–27). In the other camp were the Polygenists who insisted that no, blacks were not even really human beings at all, but beast of the field placed on earth on day 5 of creation week (Genesis 2:19).
This is the same community who later, when Darwinism achieved ascendency, changed their rationalization from Biblical to biological and tried to frame the black races as "less evolved." In neither case was the rationale ultimately to blame for the rationalization. So too it is intellectually bankrupt to try and blame the excesses of 20th century communism on its "abandonment of religion." Had the Soviet union been explicitly Orthodox, or Maoist China explicitly Confucian the death toll would likely have been unchanged.
The historic barbarity of humanity does not appear to specifically correlate one way or the other with religion at all... with the key exception that exclusive monotheisms invariably prove to be more intolerant than polytheism. But the conflict between science and religion we are talking about in this thread has nothing to do with whether or not one is more brutal than the other. The introduction of that issue is purely a red herring.
The discussion
here has to do with which pursues objective truth, and which does not.
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